I had the privilege of attending Opening Day at Comerica Park yesterday. It was very cold in the stadium – I heard the wind chill was a balmy 28 degrees.

Anyway, about halfway through the game, the sun peeked out from behind the clouds for the first time, and a loud, sustained cheer went up – one of the louder ones on the day. A few second later, the Tiger batter (who I believe was Carlos Guillen) h

it a ball in the air and many people in the crowd leaped up, thinking it was going to be a home run.

Not even close. It was a lazy fly ball to center and the inning was over. I wondered why people thought that was goin

g to be a home run – just because the sun came out? Hitting a home run is not an easy thing to do and requires a lot more skill and talent than having the sun come out.

Life’s a lot like that. I’m a big believer that you create your own luck. And yes, I admit to playing the “if I can successfully throw this piece of paper in the wastebasket, then something good will happen to me” game, but there’s more to it than that. You have to do at least some work to make good things happen.

But when everything falls into place, it makes success all the more sweeter.

I’m at the gate in New York waiting to fly back to Detroit. I’m working on my laptop and look next to me and there’s a guy that looks a lot like Yzerman next to me. I text this information to my friend Tom and he replies with “hero.”

That reply made sense. If you don’t know, Steve Yzerman was a great hockey player for the Detroit Red Wings. He was captain of the team for two decades, scored almost 700 goals, won three Stanley Cups and is basically a legend of Detroit sports lore. Great guy on and off the ice.

Could it be him? It made sense. He could also be going to Detroit (there were actually two flights to Detroit from New York in the same area), he was in New York where a lot of people go for business or for fun and he was about average size, which is true hockey-player size.

I watch as the Yzerman doppleganger walks to a nearby store and then lose track of his whereabouts for the next half hour. Finally, it’s time to board the plane and I head over to say hi to Dave, one of our clients at Cadillac. Dave has also seen the Yzerman clone and we launch into a discussion about whether it can be him.

Dave points out a key fact – the Yzerman twin has a small but noticeable scar on his face, a telltale sign of a possible connection to the rough-and-tumble sport of hockey. He also looks like he’s about the right age and size.

I’m not entirely convinced. You see, when sort-of Stevie Y walked over to the store, he sort of ambled over there casually. The Steve Yzerman I know would have walked with a purpose.

Anyway, it came time to board the plane and I stared down everybody walking on to that plane. No sign of maybe-Yzerman. I did the same drill when we got off the plane. No luck.

So maybe it wasn’t him. Or maybe, as Dave pointed out, it was him, but since he was at the airport, he could have been off to anywhere in the world.

One last thought: The Wings have struggled all year because of injuries. But since the Olympic break, they are red-hot and are hitting on all cylinders going into the playoffs. It’s on. It’s so on.

I’m heading to New York for the New York Auto Show. I’ve been to the Big Apple a few times already and really like the city. So without further ado, here are some quick thoughts about what I think about New York:

If I ever lived in New York, I would have a difficult time actually getting any work done at my job. I would have the incredible desire to just wander around Central Park.

If you live in Manhattan, I don’t get how you can raise a family. Just seems way too crazy. I would definitely live outside and then commute.

Apparently, there are 16,000 restaurants in the city. Why would you ever eat at McDonald’s or Applebees?

Anytime I’m in the city, it’s hard to shake the fact that there are people all around me who are probably doing something about 100 times more interesting than what I’m doing. Say I wanted to stay in and watch “The Office” on Thursday night. I would feel very anti-social.

Whenever the Yankees are at home, I love how the TV networks show the New York skyline, as if Yankee Stadium is somehow right in the middle of Manhattan, which it’s not. It’s like when they show downtown Detroit during Pistons games. Um, not even close.

Do they really still pack meat in the Meatpacking District?

Best thing about walking around Manhattan? The fact that all the streets are numbered. For a guy like me who gets lost all the time, it’s a lifesaver.

I just finished reading a great interview in The New York Times with Guy Kawasaki, the co-founder of AllTop, a news aggregator site. I’m quite familiar with Kawasaki’s work – he’s widely regarded as one of those “influencers” we in social media like so much.

Here was my favorite part. The question was: How do you hire? Kawasaki’s response?

The most important thing is that you hire people who complement you and are better than you in specific areas. Good people hire people better than themselves. So A players hire A+ players. But others hire below their skills to make themselves look good. So B players hire C players. C players hire D players, etc.

I love that – surround yourself with people that are better than you. Why? Because I certainly don’t know everything (contrary to what I thought in high school and college :)) and you can learn so much from other talented people.

This is quite evident at Weber Shandwick. A couple weeks ago, I was writing up a creative brief for a video idea and I thought it was pretty good. I showed it one of our video guys and he immediately came up with three ways to make it better that I didn’t even really think about.

I’m a big believer that everybody has a certain talent and we should give these people the ability to let those talents show so they can succeed (see number eight in this article on the Harvard Business Review blog).

The University of Michigan football team has this problem – they have a great athlete named Denard Robinson who plays quarterback. He’s a great runner and improviser, but make poor reads and isn’t the greatest passer. This year, I hope Coach Rodriguez puts him in a position to succeed – give him the ball in space as a specialist and let him run. He’ll thrive, the offense will thrive and we’ll of course win the Big Ten this year.

Hey, I can dream, right? That’s the other secret to success – don’t give up on your dreams.

There was a study released a couple months ago that said Americans consume 34 gigabytes of information each day. File this in the Captain Obvious folder, but that’s a lot. The study includes everything from the Web to TV to radio. The reportalso says Americans consume 100,000 words per day on average (read, heard, etc.)

I’d say I’m probably way above the average in terms of information consumed. At work, I get probably at least 100 e-mails a day and I write and reads thousands of words in presentations, reports and creative briefs and all that good stuff.

Then, I get to the 183 feeds in my Google Reader, the 559 people I follow on Twitter, the Facebook feed, the episode of “The Wire” that I’m watching as I type this and the “Game Change” book about the 2008 election that I’m going to read before I go to sleep.

It can easily be overwhelming. Let’s take one part of that – my blog reader. Here’s how I try to keep it under control:

RSS feeds – RSS isn’t anything new, but it makes my life so much easier. Everything gets sent right to me in one place and I can plow through hundreds of posts quickly. My approach is to skim the headlines as fast as I can … if it’s interesting, I’ll read it quickly or if it’s a longer piece, I’ll bookmark it for later. I don’t worry about not reading every word on my favorite site … just the stuff I care about. And yes, I fit exactly into the Snack Culture lifestyle – consuming everything in bite-size pieces.

Check information throughout the day – I’ll usually try to knock out some reading before work and during lunch to get a sense of the headlines of the day. Since I read a lot of blogs on the same topic, I’ll see the same stories over and over again during the day. I’ll know then what’s most important and pick one of them for a good analysis of the topic.

Find the experts – With so much information available, it’s up to me to figure out which sites are knowledgable and give the most value and those are the ones I read. If something’s worth knowing, I know it will appear on the top sites. Even though TMZ or Perez might be really popular – I don’t get much value from them so I skip right over them.

Make it fun – I don’t read all these just for work or because I feel I have to. I get a lot of enjoyment out of consuming information. For instance, today I learned that Martin Mayhew makes really good trades, that Tate Forcier gained six pounds and hopefully won’t get hurt all the time this year and that Digg is redesigning their site to tap into the social web. Basically, they’ll customize your experience and give you articles based on your interests and what’s being shared by people who have the same interests.

It will be interesting to see how Digg pulls that off. Ideally, I would love for my reader to figure out what I’m really interested in and skip over the other stuff.